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sometimes confused or misguided,’ he said, smiling.
To show he had no hard feelings about my insolence, al-Zindani letme see some of his most precious volumes, and we talked more about the early days of Islam. I was learning fast.
A friend from Dammaj introduced me to a network of young Salafis in the city. Some were veterans of jihad who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and more recently had been in the Balkans. Of the growing pool of militants in Yemen, some were beginning to see the West, and especially America, as the enemy of Islam. There had already been bomb attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia; and more were being planned. One of this circle was an Egyptian named Hussein al-Masri. Although he did not acknowledge it directly he was very likely a member of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad. Al-Masri was a wanted man in his homeland. In his mid-thirties, he had a diffident manner and soft voice that belied his experience as a militant with extensive contacts. He was also the first person I heard utter the name Osama bin Laden.
At that time – in early 1998 – bin Laden was building al-Qaeda’s presence in south and eastern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and around Jalalabad. Welcomed by the Taliban, his organization was already plotting attacks against Western targets, including a deadly bombing it would carry out months later on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. 5 Al-Masri told me of the training camps al-Qaeda had established in Afghanistan and how to travel there via Pakistan. He said he could arrange passage if I ever wanted to go.
I was in two minds: the adventurer in me was tempted, but as a Salafi I had not yet accepted that waging such a jihad was legitimate. Pure Salafis also looked down on groups like the Taliban, whose practices we saw as unorthodox.
To Western eyes, such differences might seem like semantics, but to teachers at Dammaj or in Riyadh, the Taliban’s philosophy bordered on heresy. They encouraged ‘excessive’ praying beyond the five times a day mandated by the Prophet. Sheikh Muqbil had taught that one should not even countenance sitting down with such men. While they might be Muslims, they could lead you to damnation.
In making this point he liked to quote a famous hadith of the Prophet: ‘My Ummah [nation] will break into seventy-three sects – only one will be in paradise and the rest will be in hell.’
For now, my sense of ideological purity won out.
Among my companions in Sana’a was a dark-skinned seventeen-year-old Yemeni with a generous smile and a shy courtesy. Abdul had curly, short-cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard. He can’t have weighed more than seven stone; his legs were like stalks. But even at his age he was well connected with militants in Sana’a – men who had fought the communists in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia. Abdul and I often talked late into the night at his home, fuelled by endless glasses of sugary mint tea. I loved his natural enthusiasm and curiosity. He was full of questions about Europe, amazed and delighted that Islam had gained a foothold in these northern heathen lands. He yearned to travel and enjoyed practising his rudimentary English on me. I was impressed by his deep religious commitment. He was not unusual in knowing the Koran by heart but his voice was so melodic that he was often asked to recite prayers in the mosque.
My time in Yemen had deepened my faith. It had been little more than a year since I had entered a mosque for the first time and mumbled my Declaration of Faith. Now I knew the Koran, could recite hadith and discuss Islamic law. The man who had sent me, Mahmud al-Tayyib, had probably expected I would return home within weeks, unable to cope with the hardships of the poorest country in the Arab world.
But after the best part of a year in Yemen I was ready for a change. I had endured two bouts of dysentery, had no money and was beginning to tire of being stared at in the streets
To show he had no hard feelings about my insolence, al-Zindani letme see some of his most precious volumes, and we talked more about the early days of Islam. I was learning fast.
A friend from Dammaj introduced me to a network of young Salafis in the city. Some were veterans of jihad who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and more recently had been in the Balkans. Of the growing pool of militants in Yemen, some were beginning to see the West, and especially America, as the enemy of Islam. There had already been bomb attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia; and more were being planned. One of this circle was an Egyptian named Hussein al-Masri. Although he did not acknowledge it directly he was very likely a member of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad. Al-Masri was a wanted man in his homeland. In his mid-thirties, he had a diffident manner and soft voice that belied his experience as a militant with extensive contacts. He was also the first person I heard utter the name Osama bin Laden.
At that time – in early 1998 – bin Laden was building al-Qaeda’s presence in south and eastern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and around Jalalabad. Welcomed by the Taliban, his organization was already plotting attacks against Western targets, including a deadly bombing it would carry out months later on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. 5 Al-Masri told me of the training camps al-Qaeda had established in Afghanistan and how to travel there via Pakistan. He said he could arrange passage if I ever wanted to go.
I was in two minds: the adventurer in me was tempted, but as a Salafi I had not yet accepted that waging such a jihad was legitimate. Pure Salafis also looked down on groups like the Taliban, whose practices we saw as unorthodox.
To Western eyes, such differences might seem like semantics, but to teachers at Dammaj or in Riyadh, the Taliban’s philosophy bordered on heresy. They encouraged ‘excessive’ praying beyond the five times a day mandated by the Prophet. Sheikh Muqbil had taught that one should not even countenance sitting down with such men. While they might be Muslims, they could lead you to damnation.
In making this point he liked to quote a famous hadith of the Prophet: ‘My Ummah [nation] will break into seventy-three sects – only one will be in paradise and the rest will be in hell.’
For now, my sense of ideological purity won out.
Among my companions in Sana’a was a dark-skinned seventeen-year-old Yemeni with a generous smile and a shy courtesy. Abdul had curly, short-cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard. He can’t have weighed more than seven stone; his legs were like stalks. But even at his age he was well connected with militants in Sana’a – men who had fought the communists in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia. Abdul and I often talked late into the night at his home, fuelled by endless glasses of sugary mint tea. I loved his natural enthusiasm and curiosity. He was full of questions about Europe, amazed and delighted that Islam had gained a foothold in these northern heathen lands. He yearned to travel and enjoyed practising his rudimentary English on me. I was impressed by his deep religious commitment. He was not unusual in knowing the Koran by heart but his voice was so melodic that he was often asked to recite prayers in the mosque.
My time in Yemen had deepened my faith. It had been little more than a year since I had entered a mosque for the first time and mumbled my Declaration of Faith. Now I knew the Koran, could recite hadith and discuss Islamic law. The man who had sent me, Mahmud al-Tayyib, had probably expected I would return home within weeks, unable to cope with the hardships of the poorest country in the Arab world.
But after the best part of a year in Yemen I was ready for a change. I had endured two bouts of dysentery, had no money and was beginning to tire of being stared at in the streets
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